Welcome to Paradise (21 page)
Gretel listened to Laurie and watched her write down the flight information. She didn’t say yes and she didn’t say no. She did call Steve, though, and gave him her flight number. She didn’t change her mind, but she came close. She hugged Morgan and said goodbye a dozen times. At the airport she walked down the long tunnel to the plane with one very wistful backward glance at Laurie and her daughter. Laurie smiled confidently and even Morgan waved to her mother before the plane took off.
Laurie turned to Morgan in her arms just as the baby screwed up her face into a frown and began to scream.
Once in her car seat, Morgan turned bright red and flailed her arms in anger and frustration. It could have been her teeth, but Laurie suspected she was witnessing separation anxiety the likes of which she’d never imagined. And Gretel had barely left!
Laurie gripped the steering wheel tightly and wondered what to do. She realized, belatedly, that she didn’t know anything about babies except that she wanted one. Would Morgan prefer to go home or would she rather see Niagara Falls the way her mother had planned before she took off? Morgan didn’t say. She just cried as if her heart were broken.
So Laurie decided on the Falls. Maybe Morgan needed a distraction. Laurie certainly did. With one hand on the steering wheel, she reached into the glove compartment with the other for the map. Gretel had marked the route and Laurie soon saw the signs for the tollway.
Laurie kept driving and Morgan kept crying until they reached the parking lot for the viewing area of Niagara Falls. The noise of the white water was thunderous, almost loud enough to drown out Morgan’s sobs. Laurie unbuckled the baby from her seat, shoved the car keys into her pocket and grabbed Morgan’s backpack and diaper bag, all the while keeping up a line of chatter designed to soothe the child. With Morgan on her back and the diaper bag over her arm, Laurie approached the fence and gasped at the sight.
The water cascaded to a two-hundred foot drop sending a mist back up into the air. It was stunning. It was breathtaking. But not to Morgan. Her wailing reached new heights. Other tourists stopped snapping pictures of each other and looked at the baby. A man at the edge of the crowd stared at them. Probably wondering what torture Laurie was inflicting on the poor child.
“Please, Morgan,” Laurie begged under her breath. “Please don’t cry. Look at the Falls. Aren’t they beautiful?”
Laurie sank down onto a wooden bench, lifted Morgan out of the backpack and onto her lap. And Morgan continued to cry. Desperate, Laurie reached into her pocket, pulled out her car keys and rattled them in front of Morgan.
The baby stopped crying instantly, grabbed the keys out of Laurie’s hand and threw them over the fence and down into the depths of the turbulent Niagara River.
Laurie gasped, stood and looked with disbelief into the white water. “Morgan,” she breathed, “what have you done?” A better question was, what had Laurie done, handing her keys to a baby to play with?
Read an excerpt from
Wild Mustang Man
Bridget McCloud braced her elbows against the wooden fence and held her binoculars up to her eyes. There on a hilltop, riding a wild mustang horse, was the man she was looking for—strong, virile, powerful and sexy. Unable to restrain herself, she let out a whoop of joy. She was not a bounty hunter or a desperate spinster. She was the president and owner of Bridget McCloud Advertising, about to land her first major account with the manufacturers of Wild Mustang men’s cologne.
Now that she’d found her Wild Mustang Man, nothing could stop her. She grinned to herself, wishing her administrative assistant and best friend Kate was there to share the excitement and the view. Not that she would have surrendered her binoculars. Not just yet.
Silhouetted against the blue Nevada sky, wild horse and rider moved as one. Bridget could almost hear the rhythmic fall of the hoofbeats, feel the muscles ripple under the man’s denim shirt and smell...yes, she could almost smell the tangy, masculine scent of Wild Mustang men’s cologne.
With a sigh of ecstasy, she let the binoculars fall against her chest and lifted her Nikon from its case, pressed the shutter and filled her memory card with shots of her future Mustang Man. She never saw the bicycle bearing down on her from out of nowhere. If she had she would have leaped out of the way before it plowed into her and knocked her to the ground.
The bike crashed onto the dirt road, the rider thrown to the side. Bridget staggered to her feet, dazed and bruised, head pounding. The daredevil rider, all four feet of him, was sitting in the dirt, staring at his skinned knees.
“Sorry,” he said, wide blue eyes looking up at her as she limped toward him. “Didn’t know anybody was there.”
“Same here,” she acknowledged. “But I think you got the worst of it. You or your bike,” she said, noticing the smashed spokes, the twisted handlebars. “I better take you home and get you bandaged up.”
“I am home,” he said, waving at the fields on the other side of the fence. Painfully he got to his feet, but his knees buckled and Bridget caught him in her arms before he lost his balance again. His dusty hair tickled her nose. She felt his body stiffen like a wounded animal, before he yanked himself out of her arms. “I’m okay,” he said, his upper lip stiff with pride. But his voice shook ever so slightly. “I can crawl through the fence and be back before my dad knows I’m gone.”
Bridget frowned at his stubborn determination, more than a little concerned about the cut above his eye and the blood oozing from his knees.
“What if I crawl through the fence with you and make sure you get there?” she offered.
He shrugged his narrow shoulders, and his teeth chattered. Bridget wondered if there were more injuries than met the eye or if he was that afraid of his father. “Okay, but we gotta hurry. If my dad finds out about this he’ll have my hide.”
“What’s left of it,” Bridget muttered, giving him a worried glance as she followed him, squeezing herself through the slats in the fence.
The two of them staggered up a sagebrush-covered hill toward a sprawling ranch house, two steps forward, one step back as Bridget’s binoculars bounced against her chest, and her camera case swung back and forth from her shoulder. She began to wonder who was helping whom. The further they walked, the stronger the boy got, and the weaker Bridget felt. Oh, to be young again, she thought, as he pulled her forward, his small grubby hand in hers. Oh, to be wearing sensible shoes instead of sandals.
She wasn’t married, though she’d always thought she would be by now with a child of her own. Not a daredevil boy who raced a bike in defiance of his parents’ wishes, but a sweet obedient little girl dressed in ruffles. She sighed. Because it was not to be. She’d seen her plans for marriage and a family go down the drain this past year and was proceeding full steam ahead on the next best thing—her career. She couldn’t deny, however, that the stubby, grubby little hand in hers brought a rush of maternal and protective feelings she thought she’d successfully buried, even though she, with her bruises, was in no shape to protect anyone, especially not this tough little kid here.
“How old are you?” Bridget gasped, the hot dry air searing her lungs as she trudged slowly upward.
“Five and a half. Going on six.” He turned to look up at her, squinting in the bright sunlight. “How ‘bout you?”
“Thirty-one.”
His blue eyes widened in amazement “You don’t look that old.”
“Thank you,” Bridget said with a reluctant smile.
“My dad’s older than you.”
“Really? Is he around, by any chance?”
The boy pointed to the hill behind the house. “Out riding.”
“What about your mom?”
He pointed up at the cloudless blue sky. “She’s in heaven.”
Bridget was stunned into momentary silence and her leaden feet stopped moving.
“Come on,” he urged, almost jerking her arm out of its socket.
She picked up her feet, wiped the perspiration off her forehead and forced herself to move. This was no time for gratuitous sympathy. Besides, she had no idea what to say to a boy whose mom is in heaven. This was a time to change the subject.
“Does your dad ride wild mustangs?” she asked, pausing to catch her breath.
“How’d you know?”
“If his name is Gentry, I’ve heard about him. That’s why I’m here. I want to talk to him.”
“‘Bout a horse?”
Bridget refrained from saying, No, it’s ‘bout a men’s cologne. This wasn’t the time or place to broach the subject of his father as a male model, so she just nodded. And thanked God the large, stone ranch house was now only steps away.
As the boy pushed the heavy, oak front door open, Bridget drew a deep breath and stepped into the quintessential Western living room with native rugs on the wide-planked floors and large leather chairs flanking a huge stone fireplace. Their footsteps echoed off the thick walls of the empty house.
She had a brief, fleeting view of a large, framed photograph of a woman on top of the mantel before the boy dragged her down a long hallway to a cool, tiled bathroom. Before she could stop him, he was kneeling on the sink, dripping blood all over the aqua porcelain and pawing frantically through the medicine chest, tossing bottles and jars and tubes to the floor where they landed in noisy confusion.
“Stop, whatever your name is, and let me clean you up,” Bridget demanded, setting her equipment on the edge of the tub. With a burst of energy, she lifted the boy off the sink, sat him firmly on the toilet seat and grabbed a washcloth from a towel rack. Miraculously he held still, hands clenched into fists, his face pale under a smattering of freckles while she carefully cleaned the wounds on his knees with soap and water then turned her attention to the laceration over his eye.
Boys, she thought with a flash of intuition—this is what they do. They take chances. They climb up too high. They ride too fast and they fall off their bikes. They skin their knees. And this is what their moms do. They clean them up and send them back out to play. But she was not his mom. She was nobody’s mom. And wasn’t likely to ever be. Not the way her life was going. That was okay. There were other things to do besides being a mother. And she was doing them. But for the first time in weeks the face of Scott Marsten flashed before her eyes. His cruel words rang in her ears.
“Face it, Bridget, you just don’t have what it takes to make a man happy. I thought it was because you put all your effort into your job, but now it turns out you haven’t got what it takes to make it in advertising, either.”
Blinking back a sudden rush of tears, Bridget peeled the adhesive off an extra-large-size Band-Aid when heavy footsteps resounded down the hall, and a loud, angry voice called, “Max, where are you?”
So that was his name. Max froze, his eyes wide with fright. Bridget slapped the bandage on the boy’s knee while she imagined an angry Paul Bunyan on his way to skin both their hides with his ax.
“What in the hell is going on here?” the man demanded, filling the doorway with his six-foot, three-inch frame, and pinning Bridget with his piercing blue eyes.
“It...it was an accident,” she stuttered, suddenly feeling five and a half, going on six, instead of a mature thirty-one, going on thirty-two.
His gaze shifted to his son, who was now standing, feet planted apart, staring up at his father. “Max?”
“I ran into this lady on my bike, and I gotta go get it. She came to see you ‘bout a horse,” he said edging around his father. Bridget’s wobbly legs wouldn’t hold her up another minute. She sank to the commode as she listened to Max’s footsteps racing back down the hall. When the front door slammed shut, she looked up into stormy blue eyes under a furrowed wide brow.
“I can explain,” she said weakly. This was not how she planned to meet the man destined to sell a million bottles of men’s cologne in the next year. Not sitting on a toilet seat with her leg gashed in six places, her forehead pounding, one eye almost swollen shut. But now that he was standing only a few feet away, she was more convinced than ever that he was the one. On his horse he was a magnificent figure of a man. Off his horse, he was...he was everything she’d ever dreamed of. For her men’s cologne campaign, of course. Tough, handsome, rugged, sexy— Suddenly she felt faint. She leaned forward and put her head between her knees.
“What’s wrong?” Leaning forward too, Josh Gentry braced his hands on her shoulders and lifted her head to face him. He’d been so worried about Max he hadn’t noticed the woman’s eye was black-and-blue and almost completely closed. Not only that but one leg was gashed in several places.
“Good God, you’re hurt. Did Max do this?”
She shook her head, which didn’t make it feel any better.
“It was nobody’s fault. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Josh grabbed a clean towel from the shelf, doused it with soap and water and gently cleaned the dirt from her wounds. He’d done it many times for horses, and often for Max, but never for a woman with spectacular legs in linen shorts. It had been so long since he’d noticed a woman’s legs or anything at all about them, he felt slightly dazed himself, as if he was the one who’d been run down by a bicycle.
“I’m sorry about this,” he said, applying antiseptic cream and bandages, then helping her to her feet. “Where did you say it happened?”
She pointed in a general westerly direction. “On the dirt road, just outside your fence.”
He nodded, clamping his lips together to keep from exploding. Max was supposed to be at his grandparents’ ranch today, learning to groom horses. “Let’s get some ice for your eye,” he said grimly.
“I’m fine, really,” she protested, grabbing her camera case and binoculars before he walked her down the hall toward the kitchen, holding tightly to her arm in case she decided to bolt and then sue him later for negligence. She was gutsy, he’d give her that. She hadn’t even winced when he’d washed her wounds, and didn’t complain about her eye. On the other hand, she was a city woman no doubt, from her clothes and her manner, a tourist taking pictures, one who might walk out of here saying she was okay and then fall apart and have hysterics.